The World Wide Web (“the Web”) is a system for publishing information in which users may use a Web browser application to retrieve information (e.g., Web pages) from Web servers and display that information. The Web has also increasingly become a medium used to shop for items, such as products or services for purchase, rent, lease, license, trade, evaluation, sampling, etc. Indeed, thousands of different items may be ordered or obtained on the Web. In many circumstances, a user who plans to purchase an item on the Web can visit the Website of a Web merchant that sells the item, view information about the item, give an instruction to purchase the item, and provide information needed to complete the purchase, such as payment and shipping information.
After receiving an order for one or more items, a Web merchant fulfills that order by determining how and when to provide the items to the purchaser. The order fulfillment process typically used by Web merchants shares some similarities with other item ordering services (e.g., catalog-based shopping, such as from mail-order companies) in which ordered items are shipped to purchasers, such as from a centralized distribution center that maintains the ordered item in inventory. While the order fulfillment process may be as trivial as placing the order in a first-in first-out queue at a single item distribution center used by the Web merchant, other factors may increase the complexity of the order fulfillment process (e.g., having multiple geographically distributed distribution centers that are alternatives for fulfilling the order, having alternative methods of shipping an order, needing to split an order for multiple items into multiple separate groups of items that will each be supplied together, needing to outsource supply and/or delivery of some or all items to third-party vendors, etc.).
Before purchasing an item, it is typical for a user to view information about a product on an “item detail page.” The information provided on an item detail page may include such information as the item's name and source, a picture of the item, a description of the item, reviews or ratings of the item, a price at which the item is offered for sale, and one or more controls (e.g., a button) that may be activated by the user to order the item from the Web merchant.
Although shopping at a Web merchant can provide various advantages, shopping at conventional Web merchants also can have certain disadvantages. One cause of some such disadvantages is that merchants providing item ordering services typically have difficulty in accurately identifying when a recipient would receive an order having one or more specified items, for various reasons that are discussed below. For a Web-based merchant, this difficulty may cause inaccurate ordering controls and related information that reflect inaccurate identifications to be displayed to customers.
In addition to potentially causing inaccurate item ordering controls, the difficulties in accurately identifying when a recipient would receive an order also prevents item ordering services from providing to a customer or a recipient immediate feedback related to order fulfillment, regardless of whether the item ordering service is provided by a Web merchant or not. In particular, the difficulties in determining accurate delivery information may cause some item ordering services to make no attempt to provide delivery information that is specific to an order, and to instead use a generic range of time for any order (e.g., “2-14 days”). Even if a merchant attempts to provide some estimate of delivery that is specific to an order, such information will typically be inaccurate and/or imprecise due to the difficulties in determining accurate delivery information. For example, a typical merchant may report that fulfillment of an order for a particular item will take “1-2 weeks” based upon a determination that the item is out of stock. This report may be inaccurate if the item is one that can be resupplied and prepared for shipment in 2 days (and thus unnecessarily prevent a user from buying the item who needs the item to be shipped within 5 days), or if the item is one for which resupply will take more than 2 weeks (and thus unnecessarily disappointing a user who does order the item and needs it to be shipped within 2 weeks). Additionally, this report might be regarded as imprecise because of the wide range of time specified.
One reason that it is difficult for item ordering services to provide accurate order fulfillment information is that many merchants desire to process all of the orders for a given time period (e.g., a day) together, such as to optimize one or more factors after considering all of the orders (e.g., to deliver the most orders possible within a set time period, or to minimize the cost to the merchant of fulfilling all of the orders). Processing all of the orders together may allow the merchant to determine, for example, how best to distribute the orders between distribution centers to accomplish one or more such goals. This method of processing orders has the drawback, however, of not being able to provide the customer with accurate order fulfillment information when an order is placed, thus causing various of the problems mentioned above.
Since accurate order fulfillment information can be critical to some customers and is useful to virtually all customers, however, some item ordering services have attempted various techniques to minimize the inaccuracies and imprecision in the order fulfillment information that is provided to users. For example, some companies may attempt to, at the time an order is placed, estimate when that order will be fulfilled based on a fulfillment process that ignores effects on any other orders (e.g., orders placed later in that same day) and on costs of fulfilling the current order, such as by assigning the order to a distribution center that is closest to the recipient and by expending whatever resources are needed to ship that order by an expected time if possible (e.g., by increasing staffing levels with temporary workers and/or by paying premium inventory prices to quickly acquire an out-of-stock item). However, even if such techniques can minimize inaccuracies and imprecision for a particular order, they suffer from various other problems, including increasing the time needed to fulfill later orders and/or increasing the costs associated with fulfilling those orders. In addition, while such techniques may be able to minimize inaccuracies and imprecision for some orders, they are not typically able to provide accurate delivery information for any given order, as the technique for expending additional resources to attempt to meet a delivery date can fail for a number of reasons (e.g., attempts to quickly acquire an out-of-stock item may fail if third-party sources cannot quickly replenish the item, and even after increasing staffing levels to a maximum amount that is physically possible, those staffing levels may be insufficient to process an existing backlog of orders in an amount of time desired).
In view of these disadvantages of conventional systems for fulfilling orders, it would be beneficial to have a more effective approach to dynamically determining a fulfillment plan that is specific to an order or potential order and that minimizes the negative impact on future orders. In addition, it would be beneficial to be able to accurately determine actual delivery information for an order or potential order, such as to display actual delivery date or time information to a customer before or during the ordering process.